The MintPress podcast The Watchdog, hosted by British-Iraqi hip-hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know—including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
It was a pogrom, the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since World War Two. Or at least that is how corporate media across the world presented last month’s violence in Amsterdam, as Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv came to play Ajax in football’s Europa League.
Five people were hospitalized, with a few dozen more minor injuries. And yet, the event generated hysteria across the West. President Biden, for example, described the supposed attacks against Israelis as “despicable,” adding that they “echo dark moments in history when Jews persecuted.”
Dutch King Willem-Alexander, meanwhile, compared the events to the Holocaust.
Yet even as public official after public official was denouncing the Dutch and spreading the persecution narrative, video clips showing a very different reality were going viral on social media, challenging the official story.
On today’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey catches up with an eyewitness to November’s violence. Rachid El Ghazoui, better known as Appa, is a legend of Dutch hip-hop. Active for over two decades, the rapper is known for his political content and his fierce criticism of racist Dutch politicians, such as Geert Wilders. His lyrics have made him a leading voice among the Moroccan community in the Netherlands.
Appa tells a very different story to Biden or King Willem-Alexander, presenting it as a tale of Israeli football thugs trashing a beautiful city and then being challenged and overpowered by locals. As he told Lowkey:
It actually started with the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans tearing up the streets, attacking people, throwing stuff at people, kicking people off their bikes, destroying taxis. Being hooligans, actually. They started singing racist songs in the main square, [about] killing Arabs and raping women”
From there, the Israeli thugs were beaten back, and the resistance put up by locals – many of them of Moroccan descent – was treated as a vicious racist attack. Thus, what was a pretty typical case of European soccer hooliganism was transformed for political gain into a supposedly senseless anti-Semitic pogrom.
It cannot be overlooked that this media circus came just as support for the State of Israel and its genocidal policies against its neighbors is plummeting across Europe. It also should be remembered that Ajax Amsterdam – the team whose supporters supposedly brutally beat up Jews for no reason – is strongly associated with Amsterdam’s Jewish population and is known the world over as something of a pro-Israel, “Jewish club.”
The plot thickened even further after Israeli media revealed that Israel had sent many Mossad agents to Amsterdam who were present among the Maccabi fans.
Ajax won the game 5-0.
Make sure to watch the full interview here to learn how a small-scale skirmish between rival soccer fans was amped up into a major international incident.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist and academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
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